A Thermodynamic Interpretation of History CHAPTER 6.B.: The Origin of Women's Oppression (Part 2) The Origin of Patriarchy in the Eastern Ecumene (China) : 1 ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

2005 by Lawrence C. Chin.

1. The breakdown of the cultural feminist concept of patriarchy

China from the time of Sung dynasty onwards to the first half of the twentieth century must have ranked as the most “patriarchal,” as the society most oppressive of women, of all time. It is hard to imagine how women can suffer worse than had Chinese women during this millennium. More than the lack of rights what maintains their status as virtual slaves is the constant physical pain and life-long disability caused by a singular physical act of footbinding, the practice of which started in the tenth century among the aristocracies but then spread to the peasant masses, eventually affecting the entire female population of the main Chinese ethnic divisions (e.g. the Hans). As John King Fairbank describes it:

Not to mention the double-standard ethic of chastity for women which not only frequently demands from young widows but not from widowers life-long celibacy but also that, when raped, the woman commit suicide to protect her honour; and which confines women to air-tight subservience and faithfulness to their husband. Yet China remains the most obvious counter-example debunking the cultural feminist perception that the destruction of the planet is the external reflection of the oppression of women. Here is not the place for an exposition of the “cosmological mode” of imperial China, specialized since the Han dynasty as the “Mandate of Heaven.”¹ Suffice it to point out that the microcosmo-macrocosmic concentricism of the cosmological mode, by seeing human society as embedded within the very structure of the cosmos, has led Chinese for two millennia to an obsession with humans’ being in harmony with nature. We mention here only in passing the emperor’s obligation to periodically perform the ritual toward Heaven in the Temple of Heaven as an expression of the worry that his rule might be out of harmony with the cosmos; and the ruling class’ theodicy perception of every natural catastrophe (such as the earthquake that killed nearly a million people during the Ming dynasty) as the warning from Heaven that human beings or rather the dynastic house is deviating from the moral, proper behaviour inscribed within the very structure of the cosmos. Such civilization in the cosmological mode would be the most resistant toward any industrial exploitation of the earth to the point of its destruction. The popular resistance toward the first baby steps of “modernization” which the reform-minded portion of the ruling class during the late Ching dynasty attempted to effect under the pressure from Western imperialism is the most obvious example. Ordinary peoples protested against the laying of railway tracks over their land because such blatant violation of the space (e.g. graves) of ancestral spirits by man-made machineries would cause imbalance within the forces of nature governed by the ancestors; when the telegraph wire system was first set up in the cities the rusty leaks from the wires were interpreted by ordinary people as the inauspicious “Heaven’s crying” because, once again, the imposition on nature of an alien industrial infrastructure was experienced by those of the cosmological mindset as disruptive of the harmonious self-working of the cosmos and causative of environmental disasters to come. Yet these peoples were the most oppressive of women in the world. How in the world does Mary Daly’s following description of the patriarchal mode (from Outercourse, p. 326) fit in here?

The stereotypical cultural feminist paradigm as manifested in Daly’s statement here is constructed, as said, within the limited horizon of Anglo-American women’s experience between 1700s and 1950s; since the Anglophonic world is male-dominated during this period and also subscribes to the Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian Enlightenment classical capitalism paradigm that embodies an I-It attitude toward nature with which the formative capitalism starts to exploit and destroy the earth, the feminists assume that Enlightenment rationalism is paradigmatically “patriarchal” and earth-destroying, one reinforcing the other. A cursory peek outside the Anglophonic world during the 1800s, which they do not bother to take, would however immediately reveal that societies most oppressive of women, China and India, are operating in a cosmological mode that is precisely the opposite of any I-It attitude toward nature (while the Islamic society that is also most patriarchal operates in the mode of a transcendental religion that is still different from the Enlightenment paradigm), and that, across all major civilizations in the Old World during the 1700s and 1800s, the Anglophone society with its Newtonian worldview is in fact the least patriarchal, the least oppressive of women. (Even within the Western world itself, the Germany of Goethe is mildly patriarchal and yet subscribes to an earth-connecting holistic and organic Romanticism – from Herder through Hegel and all the way to Spengler and the Nazis – that is the first reactionary against Enlightenment rationalism – and which would in fact become the basis of cultural feminism of the first wave.) The correlation between gender relation and world-destruction actually seems to go in the opposite direction: the most intensified oppression of women correlates with a relatively mild exploitation of the earth² and the mildest degree of patriarchal oppression, even the liberation of women such as in today’s consumerist world-order, with the greatest degree of the destruction of the earth. That some such supposedly educated modern as Daly could have uttered a statement so irrelevant to any common-sense understanding of world history that she must be out of touch with reality altogether attests to the mind-twisting ability of first of all power and secondly of ressentiment; ideology produced by power and, sometimes by its own internal mechanism, closing in upon itself without reference to reality is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. The same cosmological mode – which in the matter of gender in the Chinese case shows up as the yin-yang binary cosmic forces manifesting in the human sphere as the active male and passive female, this yin-yang binary itself being just the Chinese specialization of an universal experience of pre-modern humanity appearing, for example, in Classical Greece in Anaximenes’ densification and rarefaction of air or in Parmenides’ light-fire and night-heavy – that prompts people to fear imposing on and disrupting the order of nature also motivates them to assign, even through force, activity-power to men and passivity-domesticity to women (the “oppression of women”). In the case of Chinese footbinding in which this yin-yang binary reaches its most extreme expression, the experiential motivator seems to be the ossification and even pathologization of the binary experience of the cosmological mode when this mode reaches a stagnant equilibrium and cannot outgrow itself toward the next stage as the West has been continuously doing – like the whirlpool one sees when flushing the toilet that sucks itself in (this also explains why society’s demand of chastity from women intensifies during Ming dynasty and reaches cultic status during Ching; see "Topics in Pre-Modern Chinese History," Ch. 11: Women and Men in Society); while the material motivator (the historical Vernunft if one will) is the saturation of the agrarian economy that has also reached equilibrium and cannot evolve toward the next mode of production: “the paradox of growth without development,” in Fairbank’s words. Hence the two observations that Fairbank made when in Beijing in the early 1930s, that “manpower was so abundant and cheap that our easiest transportation was by ricksha with an intelligent human horse between the shafts” and that “all women of middle age or over had bound feet” (p. 173), are in fact intimately related, as he notes: “Yet footbinding darkened the lives of most Chinese women for several centuries, with social and psychic repercussions that call for historical appraisal. Most obvious was the economic loss through the impairment of farm women’s muscle power and capacity for labor” (ibid.; emphasis added). Perhaps Fairbank should have noted that, without reaching the next stage of mode of production, i.e. industrialization, which requires mass-mobilization, the saturated agrarian economy would have no interest in “liberating” women and in fact would have every interest in enforcing their artificial passivity, domesticity, and extreme specialization in reproduction.

After the preliminary dismissal of the feminist “understanding” of patriarchy or male-domination, we can begin our authentic understanding of its emergence in the sphere of the Eastern Ecumene, in order to continue our narrative of the origin of women’s oppression and examine how classical patriarchies could have emerged from a primordial male-predominance already implicit in tribal organization. The more sober-minded feminist historians Anderson and Zinsser have in fact approximately perceived the origin of the classical patriarchal mode when they say:

But, as said, intergroup competition is in fact embedded in the larger phenomenon of the formation of an interaction sphere which accounts for the rise of “civilization” itself, and warfare is only one facet of this intergroup competition, the other being trade. We shall see below that, as the formation of group alliances and kinship systems on the basis of the sexual division of labour which is itself based on the hunting of meat is responsible for the primordial male-predominance in the first tribal societies of Homo sapiens sapiens in Africa, the next stage, the extreme subordination of women characteristic of the classical patriarchy in China (but all across Asia as well), emerges as a function of the saturation of the interaction sphere all across the northern China plain during the late Neolithic (Lung-Shan) period. Both the primordial male-predominance among tribes and the total subordination of women among classical civilizations are then finally the functions of supraorganismic formation, its first and second phase respectively, while the liberation of women constitutes its third phase.

The concept of the Interaction Sphere, the formation of state, and the origin of classical patriarchy and noosphere consumption

Kwang-Chih Chang writes, “State, civilization, and city are not only concurrent in their initial occurrence but also, in all likelihood, interrelated in the causes for their occurrence” (Shang Civilization, 1980, p. 364). But patriarchy (of the classical style), or extreme male-domination, is also part of this package of state, civilization, and urbanism. How to define “civilization”? “[T]o most of us… civilization is a style, a quality, that is most characteristically represented by such objects of material culture in the archaeological record as monumental architecture and religious art. To put it bluntly, these are objects that are remote from daily use or from subsistence needs, or objects that are wasteful from a utilitarian point of view. When we see an ancient society willing and able to devote considerable wealth for seemingly useless tasks, we would admire its people and call them civilized. The more wasteful they are, the greater their civilization looms in our eyes” (ibid.). The utilitarian point of view is that of our “natural” digestive tract (stomach and intestine), evidently. Namely, what is utilitarian is that which does not too much go beyond the purpose of the maintenance of the biospheric dissipative structure (the cellular or multicellular organism) as it is. What is “wasteful” or “useless” refers then to that which the mind consumes for its own sake, those sensuous images aesthetically pleasing to the mind, such as art: noosphere consumption. At this stage (of intraworld religiosity) when the mind is not yet degenerate but fully functional, or rather about to become fully functional, the meaning of “religious art,” unlike that of contemporary consumer products, is not wholly exhausted by its giving the mind a (ephemeral) pleasurable sensation of consumption and defecation, but contains within itself the potential of pointing toward the ultimate truth of the universe and existence which will unfold itself fully during the blooming of salvational religiosity all around the Old World in the Axial Time (the spiritual meaning of life). Primitive humanity is that compactness where the material and the spiritual meaning of life have not yet bifurcated. But in this thermodynamic interpretation of history we are only concerned with the first, dissipative aspect. However, to note the linkage between extreme male-domination and the appearance of “civilization” and to define “civilization” by the blossoming of noosphere consumption is also to note, perhaps rather surprisingly, the connection between that extreme male-domination and this noosphere consumption. Chang continues:

Economic stratification and urbanization in fact depend on interstate relations. This is where the concept of “Interaction Sphere” comes in. Although Chang here specifically refers to the case of Shang dynasty, he is credited with adopting the concept of the interaction sphere from the study in the formation of state or civilization in Mesoamerica, and applying it to the Chinese sphere, of the late Yang-Shao phase, to explain the appearance of warring chiefdoms during the Lung-Shan phase which prepares the formation of the first Chinese states (the first three “dynasties”) and so “Chinese civilization” itself, or, in our concern, Chinese patriarchy.

Barbara Price has presented a “cluster-interaction model” to analyze the similar situation in the Mesoamerican context of state-formation: “Within the cluster, similar processes of cause and effect are operating to produce similar, parallel or convergent effects in each member: there is thus a basic similarity in adaptive process. [Hence in George Orwell’s 1984 the three mutually warring empires, although starting out from different ideological progressivisms, communistic or fascist or whatever, through their mutual military competition eventually become exactly alike one with another.] This similarity is enhanced by the fact that cluster components are in regular, at least, sporadic, interaction with each other. Such interaction takes two principal forms – exchange and competition/warfare – which disseminate innovations and accelerate the overall processes of cultural evolution.” (“Shifts in Production and Organization: A Cluster-Interaction Model,” Current Anthropol.. 18 [1977], 210; cited by Chang, Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th ed., p. 244.) Yoffee, as noted, uses the same concept of interaction sphere to define the “horizon” of the later Neolithic phase of Mesopotamia on the basis of which the later Mesopotamian civilizations emerged in roughly the same manner as in China. As Yoffee explains the concept in its original, tribal context:

The economic and political stratification necessary for the production of the signs of “civilization” (noospheric consumption and extreme-male domination) are thus obtained. Chang then notes

The effect of homogenization, in terms of culture and organizational or political system, produced on each of the societal units by the emergence among them of such network of the circulation of goods through trade and alliance and competition in war accounts for what archaeologists have referred to as “horizon” or “horizon style” (e.g. similar styles of pottery or bronze vessels across a large area; Archaeology of Ancient China, p. 242). (Again, as Yoffee summarizes, “An interaction sphere… is a useful term in prehistory since it implies that certain material features found over a large area reflect a set of cultural relations that transcend localized nests of institutions and distinct peoples embedded within it…” Ibid., p. 258.) But “an interaction sphere is not the interaction of cultures as behavioral units. It is in fact the interaction (contact, exchange of information and goods, and conflict) among communities in a vast hierarchy of interaction levels”: “ecological, exploitory, marriage, political, military, religious, and stylistic” (Chang, p. 243).⁴ Chang continues:

The motor of an interaction sphere, today (the global market) as back then, is noosphere consumption. Today global trade is that of consumer products (although, of course, of food as well). But back then the noosphere consumption driving the Chinese Interaction Sphere was particularly related to the complexification of shamanism, and the origin of classical patriarchy is to be sought within this complexification of shamanism and this formation of noosphere consumption of the elite male minority (another way of referring to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a ruling minority) made possible within the interaction sphere. This we shall see next.

Footnotes:

1. Concept first adopted from Eric Voegelin in Israel and Revelation.

2. The mild male-predominance of hunter-gatherer societies are in fact correlative with the least ecological destruction. A slight amount of environmental destruction exists in China, for instance, that however would never rise to the level of global ecological crisis. The building of the Forbidden City during the middle of the Ming dynasty, for example, caused a certain amount of deforestation in the southernmost province. But this could only be a local problem.

3. “The term interaction sphere entered archaeological literature in 1964 in J. R. Caldwell’s description of the Hopewell interaction sphere of eastern North America. For Caldwell, the specific problem was how to describe nominally distinct Middle Woodland assemblages (ca. 250 B.C. – A.D. 250) that also possessed significant similarities in the material residues of mortuary practices. He invented the term interaction sphere to denote that there were social, ideological, and trade connections among populations that shared thereby a restricted corpus of material culture – in the Hopewell case of pipes, figurines, copper-axes – namely, those objects associated with the internment of the honored dead. Struever and Houart (1972) observed that such characteristic Hopewell items not only reflected membership in a ‘burial cult,’ but also denoted the location of ‘transaction centers’ through which the goods moved intraregionally.” Norman Yoffee, “Mesopotamian Interaction Spheres,” in N. Yoffee and J. J. Clark ed. Early Stages in the Evolution of Mesopotamian Civilization: Soviet Excavations in Northern Iraq (The University of Arizona Press, Tucson and London), p. 257.

4. Yoffee warns, however, not to confuse “interaction sphere” with the “world-system” of Wallerstein or with similar ideas such as the “West Asian world-system” of P. L. Kohl. “World-systems are by definition so geographically enormous that the core institutions that differentiate one society from another cannot be determined by contacts effected through long-distance trade. An interaction sphere, by contrast, refers exactly to the systematic, consistent, and normative set of activities that link people in such a way that a significant part of their identities are defined by such interactions.” (Yoffee, ibid., p. 258.) In the late nineteenth century, for example, Europe was the interaction sphere for the European powers, while their colonization frenzy established a world-system in which virtually all non-European peoples and nations were caught but by which they were not entirely determined in their respective identity. But today’s global community is in effect an interaction sphere and not just a world-system: the political, economic, and cultural modes of Japan, China, U.S., European and other southeast Asian countries scarcely differ from one another in significant ways.